Let's seize 2016 as opportunity to learn from mistakes and move into the future

Treating the new year as a fresh beginning is not only a good idea, it's necessary to preserve our sanity. There has to be a time when you turn your back on all the mistakes you made and start again, hoping that you somehow don't make the same ones again.

I think we made a mistake last year, for example, by not cracking down on puppy mills. Problems don't go away if you pretend they don't exist. We also did a terrible job voting, even if you believe we ended up with the best people available. Government by the people means the people have to actually do something. And we didn't solve our fundamental electricity problem, which means it will continue to bite us.

But you have to move on and look to the future, and the new year is as good a time for that as any. The trouble is that when we all look to the future, each of us sees something different. Without a shared vision, the future never comes.

I believe one of the things that hurts us the most is traffic congestion and a lack of parking. We could, for example, tear down and enlarge the downtown Central Parking Facility, a move that threatens to drive many of our local merchants away, or use valuable land in the middle of town for another parking deck, across from the Van Buren deck.

But, frankly, I don't think you can build enough parking to accommodate all the people who might otherwise want to park downtown. Adding a couple of hundred spaces means nothing when there are uncounted thousands who would like to shop or dine if it were only more convenient.

The only way I can see to make it easy and attractive for folks to have dinner, see a concert, or just hang out is to establish some form of public transportation. While there are programs like Ride DuPage, they're not for everybody and require advance notice.

Taxis are useful, if a bit expensive, but they're often not available, something I found out to my dismay when I fell at the Naperville Municipal Center, hurting myself badly enough that I doubted my ability to walk back home. I was straight out of luck.

Street cars, or other light rail systems, are great, but there is no way we could afford to build and maintain one, especially considering the access limitations caused by the river and the railroad tracks. Buses are fine, but are only profitable when there are a lot of people who want to go to the same place at the same time. That's why they're only practical for rush-hour commuting or school shuttles.

No, what we need is a method of transport that's available at any time, is safe and private, can carry individuals or small groups to their destination nonstop, and is reliable, affordable to build and inexpensive to maintain.

Driverless taxies, like the ones being developed by Google, might work, but they're many years away. Right now, the only thing that fills the bill is something called Personal Rapid Transit, computer-controlled, 4- to 6-passenger pod cars that run on independent, often elevated guideways. The kind used in South Korea's Suncheon Garden Expo are especially promising for towns like ours.

However, opposition to such transporation is intense, with proponents like myself being labeled as nut cases. I think that's largely due to the fact that we can't seem to agree on a vision of the future, and people who can't agree on that are condemned to dwell in the past.

But that's the great thing about the new year, it gives us a chance to take a fresh look at things. Our town still has enormous capacity and potential, if we can somehow avoid strangling in our own traffic and using all our valuable land for parking. We need to decide what our vision of the future is. Then we need to go there.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 27, 2015, in the News section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Let's seize 2016 as chance to create a shared vision" —
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